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AMÁLIA and the future of European Portuguese LLMs

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Re: AMÁLIA and the future of European Portuguese LLMs

#31

Post by augusto-moura »

fy20 wrote: post #26
swiftcoder wrote: post #6

It is definitely an interesting problem, because Portugal is a small enough country that the actual total corpus of available texts in (non-Brazilian) Portuguese is potentially problematic.

European Portuguese is the 13th most populous language in Europe. Not that small, there are many other European languages in use that are much smaller. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of...

It is pretty small when considering content output. It is only 11 million people, and only a fraction of them will be writing something that could be used on training datasests. If you look at the countries by scientific contribution, for example [1], Portugal is on the 28th position, while Brazil is in 14th by more than double the number of contributions.

Don't get me wrong, it is definitely impressive given Portugal's actual size, but I believe there's a hard limit for population and size that will be difficult to cross

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of...

Re: AMÁLIA and the future of European Portuguese LLMs

#32

Post by [deleted] »

swiftcoder wrote: post #13
embedding-shape wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think so, Portugal the country might be small, with a small population, but there is ~250 million "Lusophones" (native Portuguese speakers), making it the fifth-most spoken native language in the world, I'd hardly call that small :) And before everyone screams; yes, European Portuguese is different from Brazilian Portuguese, but they're still both Portuguese and understand each other, so it's not like the tex…

The authors are pretty clearly trying to draw only from European Portuguese sources - I feel like there's a fairly widespread attitude here that the language is being overwhelmed by the sheer number of Brazilian speakers (which there is obviously at least some truth to). I don't necessarily personally feel like preserving European Portuguese in amber is a worthwhile goal (anymore than it is productive for Brits to be…

[deleted]

Re: AMÁLIA and the future of European Portuguese LLMs

#33

Post by augusto-moura »

philipwhiuk wrote: post #22
swiftcoder wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The authors are pretty clearly trying to draw only from European Portuguese sources - I feel like there's a fairly widespread attitude here that the language is being overwhelmed by the sheer number of Brazilian speakers (which there is obviously at least some truth to). I don't necessarily personally feel like preserving European Portuguese in amber is a worthwhile goal (anymore than it is productive for Brits to be…

> I don't necessarily personally feel like preserving European Portuguese in amber is a worthwhile goal (anymore than it is productive for Brits to be prickly about the meteoric rise of US English). That's easy to say when you're not on the other end of US defaultism.

To be fair, it is only natural: Portuguese itself only came to be because the Roman Empire conquered the Lusitan land [1], a lot of English comes from Norman French from the Norman conquest [2], the Americas didn't speak European languages until 500 years ago or so, etc.

If you give enough time, all languages will change, and some of them because of major political changes/conquests

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleohispanic_languages

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influence_of_French_on_English

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigenous_languages_of_the_Am...

Re: AMÁLIA and the future of European Portuguese LLMs

#34

Post by [deleted] »

Miraste wrote: post #8
embedding-shape wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What LLM isn't forced into a specific language? That'd be a weird language model no one could understand, you need to chose at least one language, ideally the same as the creators speak. Besides, there is knowledge that is locked behind languages, there are things known in Portuguese that aren't known in other languages, and the same for other languages too. More accessibility to those ideas wouldn't hurt.

To my knowledge, all major LLMs are multilingual. This article could really have used an evaluation of existing models' European Portuguese capabilities.

[deleted]

Re: AMÁLIA and the future of European Portuguese LLMs

#35

Post by CrimsonRain »

hartator wrote: post #2

What a waste of time and money. Trying to force a LLM into a specific language makes you missed out on most of the world knowledge.

Europe always has a thing for their languages. They think many languages make them stronger while spending billions in system loss due to communication barriers. It is obvious they will try to do the same with LLMs and call it the next best thing since bread and butter.

I went to JCON EUROPE this year. The amount of "Europe this" "Europe that" "sovereign this, sovereign that" is mind boggling and just a waste of time and money. The regular people know this and thus left the conferences mid way. But somehow the people "in charge" really need to push this. Same thing here.

Re: AMÁLIA and the future of European Portuguese LLMs

#36

Post by swiftcoder »

philipwhiuk wrote: post #22
swiftcoder wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The authors are pretty clearly trying to draw only from European Portuguese sources - I feel like there's a fairly widespread attitude here that the language is being overwhelmed by the sheer number of Brazilian speakers (which there is obviously at least some truth to). I don't necessarily personally feel like preserving European Portuguese in amber is a worthwhile goal (anymore than it is productive for Brits to be…

> I don't necessarily personally feel like preserving European Portuguese in amber is a worthwhile goal (anymore than it is productive for Brits to be prickly about the meteoric rise of US English). That's easy to say when you're not on the other end of US defaultism.

> That's easy to say when you're not on the other end of US defaultism.

I mean, I’m a Brit who lived a long time in the US, so that’s a dynamic with which I am rather familiar

Re: AMÁLIA and the future of European Portuguese LLMs

#37

Post by lmf4lol »

CrimsonRain wrote: post #35
hartator wrote: post #2

What a waste of time and money. Trying to force a LLM into a specific language makes you missed out on most of the world knowledge.

Europe always has a thing for their languages. They think many languages make them stronger while spending billions in system loss due to communication barriers. It is obvious they will try to do the same with LLMs and call it the next best thing since bread and butter. I went to JCON EUROPE this year. The amount of "Europe this" "Europe that" "sovereign this, sovereign that" is mind boggling and just a waste of time…

whats your suggestion? we just eradicate all of our culture and languages and go full on english ?

whats wrong with exploring ways to keep national languages alive in the LLM area

Re: AMÁLIA and the future of European Portuguese LLMs

#39

Post by TheMagicHorsey »

pu_pe wrote: post #7

I'm not sure the direction should be to finetune a small local model for each country or language. These models are already not particularly great at information retrieval, so I doubt anyone would use them for questions like the author suggests (ie who was the president between X and Y). Similarly, they are a little too lightweight to be used for translations too. If the budget is indeed so modest (5.5 million euros!…

This is the way.

Sovereign SOTA models might also be possible with nation-state involvement. But this is a good stopgap.

Re: AMÁLIA and the future of European Portuguese LLMs

#40

Post by mariopt »

This model is a waste of Public Funds.

There is no public website to use it, be it free or paid, the dataset is not public, the code is not public (The github URL in the article returns 404 ), the claimed model intelligence is so low that is pretty much useless at 32K context and massively inferior to GPT‑4o.

As per tradition in Portugal, some people managed to get 5.5 Million to produce nothing and no one is asking questions.

You want a better idea? Just fine tune the open source Kimi 2.6 with an open source Portuguese dataset, the cost would be under a million and we would be getting something useful.

It would be really nice to know what happened to 5.5 Millions whilst not being able to even provide a functional website to use the model.

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